Dee Forbes banging the RTE TV licence drum again 60m uncollected fee *poll not working - pl ignore*

Simply put, An Post could enforce the collection properly, but it seems to have taken it easy after all 10m, per year along with the social welfare payments help the company. An Post may struggle without their government funding, including the government savings accounts.

I have mention that TG4 have direct exchequer funding however such funding is not, and will never be, ringfenced by a government. Successive governments could easily change that policy, indeed as the great Pat Rabbitte once said "in the heat of an election campaign…", so even the parties agreeing to such ringfencing could easily change their minds.

In 2011 the decision was made that TG4 would be partly funded by the License fee and the exchequer, the government cut funding to TG4 and replaced it with a portion of the licence fee. This policy was introduced by a Green minister (Ryan) and his Labour successors (Rabitte and White) continued the policy until it was ended in 2018 by a FG minister (Richard Bruton).

TG4 has since seen increases in its direct funding however its not ringfenced, should Ireland ever see a recession the first thing any government will cut is funding to broadcasting (public service media) and the Arts, its either that or public services like health, welfare and infrastructure.

This idea of replacing the licence fee with Direct Exchequer funding to me seems unworkable.

S4C had similar problems in the UK AFAIK they now take a portion of the licence fee, I never understood why the Welsh government didn't directly fund S4C after devolution considering the vast majority of their members would agree with such ringfencing, but it would be a hard decision to reverse and as you point out politicians like to get elected, leave those hard decision to the Tories and then be vocal on their bad decisions. Same goes for the Scottish government, if you want national public service broadcasting / media perhaps pay for it out of the Scottish parliament instead of out of the licence fee.

So what do you think?

in your opinion (which given the evidence of your never ending praise of RTÉ and a certain talent agent and his band of mystery men and women and a failure to ever criticise anything any of the above do suggests you have a vested interest).

As per my previous post (I am not alone in this) i would propose an alternative view where there would be no licence fee at all and RTÉ would be left to survive on merit.

What are they not compliant? The vast majority of people used to pay their licence fee every year, in the last 3 years it has plummeted, you have to ask yourself why is this the case? I wonder what the elephant in the room is.

When you consider all new smart TV continue to include a tuner of of some kind, this means less and less people are just using smart devices with a monitor and/or a projector, and even when this was popular it was a tiny percentage of people doing it.

The over 70s all get a free licence, but with the rise in the number of households even more and more people are not paying that fee, why? what happen? is there anything that could have persuaded them to decide to stop paying? I wonder what that might have been?

PBS maybe a part of democracy, but you still fail to show why it should come from direct funding and how that will be administered and by whom.

RTÉ who are the main company that administer the licence fee have wasted it over the years, why should direct public funding be used any differently to the current licence fee. You seem to forget that TG4 is already directly funding and as I have pointed to you it has inherent political problems.

I would disagree with RTÉ going it alone, but I also disagree with RTÉ being kept with the same structures that have failed in the past.

Again in my view PSB or PSM should be divided like so : -

1. Screen Ireland takes control of TV (with RTÉ one and 2 becoming, Fís 1 and Fís 2)
2. TG4 takes control of Irish language programming and children's (TG4, CULA4 with RTÉjr and RTÉ RnaG becoming 4KIDS and RAIDIO4)
3. NCH (national concert hall) takes over the concert orchestra and Lyric FM (they've all ready taken control of RTÉ NSO and Choirs).
4. 2RN the networks company takes control of RTÉ Radio (Radio 1, 2FM and GOLD) and the studio at Montrose
5. What remains in News and Current Affairs stays with RTÉ but rebranded to Media News / Nuacht na Meán, providing news for the above broadcasters, with agreements to utilizes reports on indpenendent radio and TV.

This saves on the idea that we have to set up new companies as all of the above currently exists.

And why happens when that money is misused?

ideally a bailout and increases in salaries and fees.

I'm well aware of who is and his tactics, I've followed this thread and others for a long, long time. Long enough to know that if the likes of Tubs and Raymond had actually done a proper day's work, that they would thnnk themselves lucky that they had what they did and stop wingeing about how hard done by they were.

Let put it this way did you think RTÉ civil duty is to run the national broadcaster correctly?

Last year a total of 768,657 households paid their licence fee, this is a drop of 179,267 since 2022, the year before we found out that the management had no civic duty.

This year I estimate it to be at 751,348 by the end of they year, in the first 5 months of the year 14,022 extra spongers refused to pay, They have to increase payments on average by 2,000 for the next 7 months to reach their final 2025 figure! in 2025 those seven months averaged 1,800 additional spongers.

For anyone interested I do not have a TV licence.

Like it or not Dee Forbes gamed the system perfectly

By completely removing herself from the public eye and avoiding the media crossfire for two full years, she protected her peace, stonewalled the State, and fundamentally exposed the complete lack of any actual powers held by parliamentary inquiries. She left behind a masterclass in the power of saying absolutely nothing at all

Three years.

You mean the part where Mr. Kelly provided invoices from CMS for RTÉ but made out to Astus UK as part of a concerted effort to hide the transactions?

No, I noted that. Meticulously.

What credit do you feel he should get for that?

The Toyman and Mr. Kelly were far from fully earnest in their appearance. They came of their own volition not with the aim of aiding the enquiry but in a callous and utterly transparent attempt to spin the story into a narrative sympathetic to them, despite being complicit in the attempted deception (again, Mr. Kelly supplied the invoices).

From submitting their dossier an hour before the hearing started in a deliberate attempt to obfuscate to spinning a “woe is me, I’m just a simple lad who doesn’t understand numbers” narrative from The Toyman to Me. Kelly’s “we were just following orders” to both Mr. Kelly and The Toyman both being addressed on multiple occasions as to their forthrightness to the wonderful and memorable hubris-filled soundbytes both gave us, their appearance was a crash course in how not to do it.

It made for delicious viewing.

What case is this? That people have an opinion on those who appear before the committee?

I look at someone like Breada O'Keeffe, who explained how wonderful she was as CFO … then only to be found out that she taken a voluntary redundancy which she shouldn't have been given… and then tried to text the Deputy DG to explain her position after she refused to attend the committee.

I wonder did D4bres ever have any civic duty, or did any of the members of the executive board during her time as DG have any civic duty?

Their “evidence” was ignored and scoffed at because it didn’t stand up to scrutiny because of their grandstanding and the attempted hagiographic positioning of The Toyman by Mr. Kelly and by the man himself.

I wonder do either of them regret saying things like:

“Ryan Tubridy is the most trusted man in Ireland”

or

"If that work is not called upon to be done, of course the money goes back." - and then taking almost 2.5 years to repay it without any interest of course.

or

“Yes, the salary is enormous, I understand that, but that doesn't affect my soul.”

or

"I have become the face of a national scandal, accused of being complicit, deceitful and dishonest."

The last one screams loudest. I’d remove two words though in hindsight.

The salary quote even made Laura Slattery’s QOTY in the paper of record. I think it’s safe to say she’s not on the puff piece press release mailing list….